Find nearest smaller number

Question

I have a vector of numbers

f <- c(1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 19, 27)

I want to compare the values in the vector to another number, and find the c

Answer 1

There is findInterval:

findInterval(18:19, f)
#[1] 6 7

And building a more concrete function:

ff = function(x, table)
{
    ot = order(table)
    ans = findInterval(x, table[ot]) 
    ot[ifelse(ans == 0, NA, ans)]
}

set.seed(007); sf = sample(f)
sf
#[1] 27  6  1 12 10 19  8  3
ff(c(0, 1, 18, 19, 28), sf)
#[1] NA  3  4  6  1